Archive for October 2014

posted in Photography by Cargo Cult on Sunday October 5 2014

That whole 'digital' idiocy was just a passing fad.
Everyone, myself included, is going back to tried-and-tested​
film technology - with self-developed photographic emulsion,​
a camera older than me and ...

Archive for November 2013

posted in Links by Cargo Cult on Sunday November 17 2013

Why, hello. Remember this, where I'd post interesting links
to interesting things on a regular basis? Perhaps
restricting itself to posting in a purely arbitrary manner,
it's back. And it has some thi ...

posted in Links by Cargo Cult on Thursday October 3 2013

Oh hello. This still on? Apologies for the extended silence
- no real excuse, beyond being busy with loads of stuff at
work and in my spare time. Working on a personal
Flickr-replacement for one. With ...

Archive for September 2013

posted in Links by Cargo Cult on Monday September 9 2013

Is this Sunday Things late - or exceptionally early? You
decide. I still have four minutes left of Monday. So there!
​
In media news, go see Upstream Colour, from the creator of
Primer. People claim ...

Archive for July 2013

posted in Photography by Cargo Cult on Sunday July 28 2013

Just returned from a slightly ridiculous Grand American Road​
Trip. Of note: free WiFi in cheap motels can be a bit
lacking, thus the absence of last week's Sunday Things. The
horror! The first one mis ...

posted in Media by Cargo Cult on Sunday July 14 2013

Saturdays are for getting confused about dates and setting
the following day's article to appear on Monday. Oops.
Anyhow, one brief edit later, here are a few screenshots
from a few weeks' escapades i ...

posted in Links by Cargo Cult on Sunday July 7 2013

Considering it's artificial stone, concrete can decay
remarkably quickly. I suppose it's that decidedly reactive
rebar inside. This place will appear in a million computer
games in six months or so. ...

posted in Links by Cargo Cult on Sunday June 2 2013

Good news! This blog has been going for an entire year, and
I haven't missed a single Sunday Things.
Bad news! My laptop's hard disk has just died, taking with
it numerous bookmarks I'd been collat ...

posted in Links by Cargo Cult on Monday May 13 2013

Next step: launch Bowie into space as a permanent fixture on​
the ISS.
Commander Chris Hadfield? Already people's hero. Now? In his​
last video from the International Space Station before
returning t ...

posted in Media by Cargo Cult on Sunday May 5 2013

Brain has been eaten by re-release of a side project. For
anyone here due to Raspberry Pi hacking or whatever, my
previous hobby of computer game modding accidentally turned
into a job. Anyway, for va ...

posted in Photography by Cargo Cult on Sunday April 14 2013

Haven't had much in the way of intertubes. Have some photos
instead - a couple shown below...
Peering at an invisible world, again. Spider! A holiday
isn't being complete without being ejected from ...

posted in Links by Cargo Cult on Sunday March 10 2013

Go read about aviation history on Wikipedia. A few brief
highlights:
Like a bat out of ... France? Ader Avion III - primitive,
steam-powered, ineffective - but looking like an escapee
from an alter ...

posted in Links by Cargo Cult on Sunday February 17 2013

Sundays are for waking up, jet-lagged, with an hour to spare​
until the Sunday Things must be posted. (Go see the recent
photos for a clue to where I've been.) So here, a
thumbnail-free edition of this ...

posted in Links by Cargo Cult on Sunday February 10 2013

Apparently, the UK is prepared for a solar superstorm, like
the "'Carrington storm' of September 1859". The what, I
thought? Cue the intertubes - the solar storm of 1859, in
which the Earth was hit by ...

posted in Electronics by Cargo Cult on Saturday January 12 2013

So, it seems someone at Radio 4 spotted this thing, and one
thing led to another and I ended up being interviewed on PM.​
Yes, me on national radio! On a proper news programme!
Blinking heck.
Like a ...

posted in Electronics by Cargo Cult on Friday January 11 2013

I promised 'Friday' for this third, code-containing article,​
and according to my radio it's still Friday (Today in
Parliament's playing) - so here we are.
Before I even had a chance to fully docume ...

posted in Electronics by Cargo Cult on Wednesday January 9 2013

Continuing this series on the hacked-together,
time-travelling Radio-4-Matic, time for some hardware. This
was going to have been a guide to dismembering an old,
non-functional radio and rebuilding it ...

posted in Electronics by Cargo Cult on Monday January 7 2013

So, there have been vague hintings at a Raspberry Pi project​
I've been building. It's been functional for a while in its
time-travelling lunacy - but first, what the hell is it?
Something one encou ...

Archive for December 2012

posted in Links by Cargo Cult on Sunday December 30 2012

Last article of 2012! At this rate, I need to extend the
archives to split things into separate years - fifty
articles in just over six months? Not bad going...
Astronauts should cut down on the ca ...

posted in Links by Cargo Cult on Sunday December 23 2012

So, the Mayan apocalypse turned out to be deeply
disappointing - and the anniversary of the birth of Sir
Isaac Newton isn't quite upon us. Ignoring calendrical
differences for the latter, obviously. S ...

Archive for November 2012

posted in Space by Cargo Cult on Sunday November 25 2012

I love the raw images service provided by the Mars Science
Laboratory teams. Inexplicable lumps of an alien world
appearing like jigsaw pieces, just asking to be reassembled
into something more unders ...

posted in Links by Cargo Cult on Sunday November 25 2012

More links for your perusal. Please note: additional
additions greatly appreciated! Post 'em in the comments. Or
send an email. But enough of that, back to the Sunday
Things:
MY HOUSE HASN'T BEEN B ...

posted in Electronics by Cargo Cult on Friday November 23 2012

I'm good at having weird things arrive through the post. The​
latest acquisition?
Observation: box is labelled 'potatoes'. Plenty of
bubble-wrap! Not seen: the Royal Warrant of Appointment.
Plenty o ...

posted in Space by Cargo Cult on Wednesday November 21 2012

That Martian space-robot has gone for another space-drive -
having poked and sniffed and ingested lots of Martian
space-dust over the past weeks. Did it detect something
important? We don't know yet!
...

posted in Links by Cargo Cult on Sunday November 11 2012

Electricity. What can't it do?
Nikola Tesla - commemorated with a shockingly powerful unit
of magnetic flux Tesla coil electricity fight - to be
honest, they look more concerned about falling off t ...

posted in Obituaries by Cargo Cult on Tuesday October 30 2012

posted in Electronics by Cargo Cult on Monday October 29 2012

Clue: it's all terribly British. Second, newly
self-contained prototype for my Raspberry Pi project is up
and running! Now I just need to get the rest of the parts.
Oddly, the main section can't be fo ...

posted in Computers by Cargo Cult on Sunday October 28 2012

This Raspberry Pi is well-travelled. RISC OS for Raspberry
Pi released - come see what the ubiquitous ARM processor was​
originally designed for. While I never actually owned one of​
the peculiarly Brit ...

posted in Links by Cargo Cult on Sunday October 21 2012

SCIENCE! Also, rusty. Remains of the High Power Auroral
Stimulation (HIPAS) Observatory in Two Rivers, Alaska -
according to Wikipedia they got up to all sorts of things,
including heating the ionosph ...

posted in Photography by Cargo Cult on Sunday October 14 2012

Everyone else was busy prancing around with Tumblr,
Instagram, Twitpic and the like, so I decided to join in on
the fun with my home-made Silicotypes. Needlessly
referencing older photographic systems ...

Archive for September 2012

posted in Links by Cargo Cult on Sunday September 30 2012

Sundays are for realising the combination of a cold and
jet-lag has prevented the Saturday night compilation of the
latest Sunday Things. So in a way, this is late - and for
the first time ever - but ...

posted in 3D by Cargo Cult on Sunday September 23 2012

What to do on long train journeys with no intertubes and no
books to read? Instead of succumbing to tedious modern media​
consumption with a Kindle or iPad, why not break out the
high-end modelling and ...

posted in Links by Cargo Cult on Sunday September 16 2012

Quick subterranean edition, assembled while waiting to board​
a plane...
Yet more real-life Minecraft. Given the opportunity to dig,
people will dig. Caves of Nottingham - the mighty BLDGBLOG
goes e ...

posted in Space by Cargo Cult on Sunday September 9 2012

Beady little spider-eyes?
That Martian robot has gained sentience, and is looking at
us. It can see itself, and it knows we can see it. Forget
the cute, cuddly and anthropomorphic mastcam self-port ...

Archive for August 2012

posted in Obituaries by Cargo Cult on Sunday August 26 2012

posted in Links by Cargo Cult on Sunday August 19 2012

While reading up on the oft-mentioned MSL Curiosity and its
nuclear-fuelled RTG power supply, I got distracted by some
altogether less safe nuclear options starting with the heady​
days of the Cold War ...

posted in Links by Cargo Cult on Sunday August 12 2012

Previously, details of landings on alien planets were left
to the imagination.
The barest minimum of links this week, thanks to an extended​
trip to Canada - so, here goes. Want updates on NASA and
...

posted in Links by Cargo Cult on Sunday August 5 2012

Following a vast journey across unfathomable emptiness, a
lone explorer shall survey the empty, potentially lifeless
wastes of ... Canada?
In case they don't have the intertubes in Canadaland, here
...

Archive for July 2012

posted in Links by Cargo Cult on Sunday July 29 2012

The Sunday Things series continues its unstoppable march
with a miscellaneous batch of non-Olympian links this week:
​
I'm sure Walter Bishop is somehow to blame. Mirror Wall - a
mirror that respon ...

posted in Photography by Cargo Cult on Tuesday July 10 2012

I'm still writing up parts two (and three) of my
how-does-my-intervalometer-work series of articles, but in
the meantime have a summery, Space Needle-y, Sunday Seattle
sunset sequence that I shot the ...

posted in Links by Cargo Cult on Sunday July 8 2012

First, we celebrate CERN's discovery of the Higgs boson and
their gloriously inappropriate use of Comic Sans! At last,
the world of physics has cast aside the dreadfully tedious
Computer Modern and re ...

posted in Electronics by Cargo Cult on Wednesday June 13 2012

Computers are way too fancy these days, with their gigabytes​
of memory, gigahertz of multiple processing cores,
hyper-parallel GPUs and terabytes of storage. Sometimes we
nerds yearn for a simpler age ...

posted in Media by Cargo Cult on Saturday June 9 2012

So, I braved the mixed reviews and went to see Prometheus -
being of the opinion that the original Alien was by far the
best of the franchise. Prepared for abject disappointment, I​
was quite surprised ...

posted in Space by Cargo Cult on Thursday June 7 2012

Surprisingly, the weather in Seattle on Tuesday was utterly
and totally cloudy - just like it had been for the annular
eclipse of the sun a few weeks ago.
Fortunately, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observa ...

posted in Links by Cargo Cult on Tuesday June 5 2012

My bookmarks-list is roughly two thousand screens long - a
vaguely-chronologically-ordered mass of things I've found
interesting in the last eight years or so.
Some of the older pages still operate ...

posted in General by Cargo Cult on Saturday June 2 2012

In keeping with today's ever-progressing consolidation of
internet communications into huge, data-farming
social-networking ultra-sites, I've decided to catch up with​
the 20th century and set up my ow ...